VIMOS - Autonomous image analysis on board of BIROS

Abstract

Some events on the Earth's surface require a fast and well coordinated reaction, such as disasters like earthquakes, floods, the occurrence of drifting icebergs or illegal activities like piracy or cleaning of oil tankers polluting the sea. Field help and prompt intervention can be supported by the examination of images recently acquired by Earth observing satellites. The extraction of useful information out of image data in real-time directly on board a spacecraft can shorten the timespan between image acquisition and an appropriate reaction drastically. This is one of two major aspects of image analysis on board a satellite. Secondly, if the amount of unusable data and/or the degree of cloudiness of a currently acquired scene is known on board, affected images can be (partially) discarded, which leads to an optimized usage of storage and downlink capacity. VIMOS will be a collection of image processing and remote sensing algorithms, running as an experiment on board of the German satellite BIROS. The purpose of VIMOS is a first demonstration of algorithms applied to data of optical sensors, dedicated to an operation on board a satellite, like e.g. cloud detection, change detection and object recognition. VIMOS will be able to send a trigger message to the autonomous on board mission planning unit, which can check possibly modified conditions on board, and react accordingly e.g. by planning a new timeline.